An American Tale

I had a good class today. Not that I’ve been having bad classes these past Mondays, it’s just that I haven’t been feeling that they were particularly inspired in any way. The class I’m teaching is a hard one to get across to students- Education in a Multicultural Society. I bring up issues of equity, race, class, and teaching children in disadvantaged areas. Most of my students grew up in suburban neighborhoods and will probably eventually teach in suburban neighborhoods, so I think they find it a little difficult to see the applicability of the course to their future teaching career. It doesn’t help that the first few lessons are on the history of American education which is even more remote. So I guess that sort of explains the rather lackluster response I’ve been getting. I don’t take it personally- I’ve come to accept it as a function of the course content.

But I think the class had a breakthrough today. We were discussing immigration and Americanization and their relationship to education in the late 19th and early 20th century. I thought it would be interesting to get my students to ask each other about their family names, how their ancestors came to this country and their ethnic extractions- basically to bring the topic closer to home so to speak. I also showed them a page on the Ellis Island website which allows you to search for people who arrived in America via Ellis Island. One girl then shared with the class about how her grandfather had fled the Turkish massacre of Armenia in the 1910s and came to this country. It was clear that it was a part of her family history that she found painful to recollect so I think the class really appreciated her opening herself up. Then we decided to see if we could find her grandfather’s immigration records through the website since she knew that he had come to Michigan from New York after arriving on Ellis Island.

And we did.

His records popped up in a second. He arrived on Ellis Island from France on May 24, 1912 onboard a ship called Le Havre and he was 26 years old. And I think that was the defining moment for the class. To see how palpably one’s past is so inextricably tied to one’s present. The girl didn’t cry or anything but she was visibly moved, and the class knew that something had changed.

Things were somehow different for the next two hours. I don’t think they suddenly liked the course any more in that split moment, or liked me any more for that matter, but I reckon they began to realize that there may be more to this course than dead men and a dead past. I take no credit for what took place today, but it was just kinda neat to have been there when someone’s defining sense of who she is gained new clarity and perspective.